‘Minutes’ tragic, thought-provoking

“Nineteen Minutes”

by Jodi Picoult (Atria Books, 464 pages, $26.95)

“In nineteen minutes you can mow the front lawn, color your hair, watch a third of a hockey game. … In nineteen minutes you can order a pizza and get it delivered. … In nineteen minutes you can get revenge.”

And with opening sentences like these, in 19 minutes you can hook just about any reader.

Best-selling author Jodi Picoult shows just how to do it in her new novel, “Nineteen Minutes.”

Picoult’s premise flirts dangerously close to the trite in many ways. She sets her action in the humdrum New Hampshire town of Sterling – that is, until the day a student walks into the high school and begins shooting. In 19 minutes, 10 lie dead.

It’s a scenario ripped from too many headlines. When police capture Peter, the young killer, the excuses he gives for his rampage are familiar, too: Bullying. Teasing. No one understood him.

But then Picoult steps back from the edge of the cliche quagmire. Her main protagonist, Alex, has an extraordinary profile: She’s a single mother and judge looking to establish a reputation on the local bench. That becomes harder when she sees her daughter Josie’s name on the list of student victims.

And it becomes harder still when Alex finds that she herself will be the unlikely judge who tries the case.

The evidence appears and disappears like phantoms of the school dead. What really caused the mass murder? A father’s gun collection? Was the deadly fuse lighted by the school bullies, or by Peter’s mom when she threatened to punish him for not standing up to his tormentors?

Were teachers to blame? Or is no one at fault, even the killer?

“Who struck the match, Peter?” the boy is asked.

“Who didn’t,” comes the reply.

Picoult’s questions have all been asked before, but never with such skill, sensitivity and depth in novel form. With much of the story told in flashback, the whole picture emerges like the colors in those old-style children’s painting books that gave up their images under brush strokes of cold water.

The author reveals something else in this novel as well: her mastery of the unexpected. Though the book holds many of the common “cards” played in these kinds of cases – the bullying card, the sexual orientation card – Picoult knows how to fake a shuffle. She deals out enough surprises to successfully bluff just about any reader.

She also delves into the thoughts and feelings of other victims of the tragedy: the killer’s parents. When Peter’s midwife mother finds that her patients no longer want her touching their newborns because of her son’s “taint,” Picoult discovers new depths of emotional hell.

Those depths would be even darker but for the light she shines into them. Picoult gives us a fresh and thought-provoking new look into a subject we may not really have plumbed before.